February 7, 2024 ⢠35 mins
đď¸On the future of local community, journalism, and business
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đď¸How AI is making the web ⌠kinder?
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đď¸Advice to our younger selves: donât try to be perfect, try to be curious
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This episode will make you want to hug your neighbors!Â
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Explore More:
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đ Books recommended during the episode: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (Available at Transom Bookshop)
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đ Bowling Alone (Available at Transom Bookshop)
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đ¤Â More about The Career Manifesto, including free resources, at mikesteib.com.
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đ Upcoming episodes: another great episode on local tech and community, something special from the artworld, a nonprofit tech revolutionary, and a pioneering world champion poker player. Text or call your questions at (213) 419.0596 or DM me on Linkedin.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome Office hours, when we sit down with the chief
executives shaping the world and we answer your most pressing
questions about leadership, careers, and life. I'm Mike Steibe, and
today we welcome to the show someone who has been
working tirelessly to improve your neighborhood. Sarah Friar is the
CEO of Nextdoor, the hyper local social networking app, which
(00:26):
went public in twenty twenty one. Previously, she was CFO
of Square and took that company public as well in
twenty fifteen. She started her career with stintse at McKinsey
and Company, Goldman Sachs and Salesforce. She serves on a
number of boards, including Walmart, and co founded Ladies who Launch,
a community and resource for female entrepreneurs. Sarah, I'm so
(00:49):
glad we caught you while you were in New York.
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Thank you. It's my pleasure. You even heated up New
York a little bit. It's not quite as.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Cold, it's not quite as called, but it's not great.
I mean, my family wants to go skiing for presidency
and I was like, are you sure?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Are you sure?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
It's too much? We got a bunch of questions from
the audience, some on your career someone next door and
the social graph and your background and finance and all
of it. So it's all right, we'll just we'll let
it rip.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Let's dive right in, all right.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
The first one came by voicemail from Enrique in Mountain View.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
He said, when next Door launched, the conventional wisdom was
that there was not room for another social network. Today
is my most used social app, and I think that's
true for a lot of people. How did next Door
break through despite powerful competitors like Facebook?
Speaker 2 (01:41):
So Enrique, thank you for that question, Thanks for being
a great neighbor. And if there was one word, I
would say, it's focus. So when you start anything, you
got to start right at the point where you know
you're going to get highest and best product market fit
to use a good kind of tech term. And next
Door started out as being the social network for your neighborhood,
(02:05):
but is owe so much more. But we've always been
all about local. We own the local knowledge graph, and
I think that focus is what's helped us now get
to over eighty five million people using the platform across
eleven countries. What I have always loved about Nextdoor is
to me, it's a global phenomenon. Everyone's a neighbor wherever
you show up in the world. Whether you agree with
(02:27):
how they run their countries, what they do in their countries,
local will still matter. So focus has been everything. Now
that said, the danger of next door is what someone
wants to describe to me as oh, you're going to
die from overeating, and I was like, what are you?
Speaker 1 (02:42):
It does everything I've got maps, I've got offers, I've
got nonprofits in my community. Is there's a lot of
lost dogs the whole time. A lot of things can
be How do you tie us from focus to what is? It?
Certainly a multi purpose app for my neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
So as we have grown, are ability obviously to do
more things compounds because we become a bigger organization. But
even today we really think about three We call them
jobs that our neighbors are trying to get done. Number
one is discuss and discover, so everything that's going on
around me locally. Help me find the best plumber, help
me find the best park for my toddler. The second
(03:20):
is more of a commercial journey, what we'd call for
sale and free. So we have a huge market place
today where a billion dollars a month is posted on nextdoor,
and about a quarter of it is actually posted for
free where people are upcycling recycling. But that journey of
why do people come to next door for that number
one is trust because it's real neighbors, and number two
is local and then the third area for us is
(03:43):
connect And that's all about the community part of nextdoor.
How do we help you find the local group that
you need, like in my.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Case, the bowling dads, You get together in the neighborhood, all.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
That and you'll find it's like this very very specific too, right,
there's all when you ask people for like local groups,
they'll say the mop, the bowling group, the running group.
But I find the spacicificity is what makes next door
so beautiful. Like in my neighborhood you'll find salsa dancers
of Marin. I live in the North Bay. There's woodworkers
(04:13):
of Mill Valley. So I love the spacicifity of local
because it could only show up in that community.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
And which of those is is your group?
Speaker 2 (04:23):
I'm all of the above. I can would work while
I saw the dance.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
I have to.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
There was also I remember when I joined, there was
a lot of friction to join, right, whereas most social networks.
When I joined, I picked a handle. It didn't have
to be me. I didn't have to verify it, I
had to prove my address. I was only allowed to
live in one area. And that must have slowed growth
for you. But at the same time, it certainly did
a lot to build trust that the people in my
(04:46):
neighborhood were legit.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Yeah, and that's very much on purpose. You're exactly right.
So a core tenant of nextdoor is it's real people
at real addresses. That has the positiveness of first of all,
building trust in the neighborhood. So you know when you
get on there that we have taken the time to
make sure these really are your neighbors that you're talking to.
It's not a bot, it's not an algorithm. It's a
real person.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
And neighbors invite other neighbors to you.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
And they also kind of keep an eye on the
neighborhood too, they make sure these truly are my neighbors
that are on there. It also helps our business model
because in the advertisers want to make sure that they're
putting advertising to real people. So being able to also
make that part of how we monetize. The two have
to go together. You've got to. We're a for profit,
we need to have a P and L that matches
our aspiration of cultivating a kinder world where everyone has
(05:32):
a neighborhood to rely on. But the two things have
to go together. And that's where being built on trust
from the get go really works well, both to bring
new neighbors to the platform, bringing other stakeholders in like
public agencies or small businesses, but it also is really
important to our business model.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
I'm going to jump ahead to a question that was
texted to us from Paul and Detroit, and this is
an area of real interest for me too. He says.
I'm a local journalist and for the last twenty years
have watched our newsrooms get small and smaller as the
local business model has struggled. Do you see a sustainable
business model for local and are there lessons to apply
(06:08):
the first part of this question. I wanted to give you.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
A chance to Yeah, I do see a business model.
I see multiple business models, right. The one that we
have chosen to start with is the ad model, and
we've seen other social platforms do incredibly well for that.
The reason I'm in New York is I'm spending a
bunch of time with customers potential customers here because a
lot of advertisers are actually they may feel like big
national companies like take the Walmarts of the world, at
(06:33):
the same time, they act incredibly locally and often they
are the place where the store manager might be the
person that sponsors the local school football team. Right, so
you get these wonderful kind of like loops that go
on locally. So advertising can be a very powerful model
for us from an enterprise perspective. But there's also no
(06:55):
place today like the Yellow Pages has kind of died.
People used to stick things up the local supermarket, right
if you had a side hospital, if you were a
dogwalker or whatever. How do you get your business known today?
If you're starting from scratch, next door is a beautiful
place for that as well. So we can go literally
from the dog walker, the babysitter, the house cleaner, all
(07:16):
the way up to some of the largest companies in
the world. Because what are they trying to do. They
want to find new customers at a local level. They
want to upsell and cross sell to those customers, but
often they want to reinvest back in the community and
show up authentically. So that is a beautiful business model,
and it's one that has driven us from private company
into the public markets.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
As you think about where Paul's coming from, where he's thinking,
he's thinking about local news and local journalism, and there's
all this research that shows our democracy suffers and local
news suffers. You have more polarization, less local engagement, et cetera.
Is there something that you're learning in the business model
that can be applied more broadly. Is there something that
traditional local media maybe has been missing as their business
(08:00):
model seems to be really struggling to keep up with
the cost of creating the content.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Absolutely. You know, we actually work today with a lot
of newsrooms across the country. I think we have about
six hundred local news organizations that can api use a
tech term into nextdoor to put their content on the platform.
What I've seen in terms of engagement is if we
put their content on the platform, right, I want a
partnership with Nextdoor and I want to put this content
(08:26):
into your doesn't get great engagement relative to user generated content.
We have tried a second route, which is let's get
the journalist who's also a neighbor to make the post.
So now we've got like a human posting again. Not
great better engagement, not great engagement. The best engagement is
when that news article is written and a neighbor posts it,
(08:47):
and again it's because it's coming. Now with editorial, it's like, hey,
you know, did you just see this got posted in
your local paper about the town console meeting last night?
I disagree with this. So this tells me that there
is a place for great journalism because to your point,
it is a cornerstone of democracy. But it has to
be done together with a community. Now, how do we
(09:08):
close that loop and help those journalists get paid for
what they do. I don't think we've gotten the whole
way there yet because today we're still dependent somewhat on
whoever they write for to have come up with the
business model to pay the journalist. But I think there's
something really interesting here. In some ways, influencers on social
media are maybe already a step ahead. But how do
(09:29):
we get journalists to almost act as individual influencers to
make sure they keep the integrity of the institution in
a way, But then how do we get them distribution
that ultimately ends in a business model. I think there
is a loop to be closed there. We've not gotten
the whole way there yet, but I do think it
is absolutely vital. It's why I tend to lean into
(09:51):
different organizations like the Nineteenth is a great example, which
sponsors women and particularly women of color.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
In the newsroom, we've seen seeds of this. National journalists
especially really leaned into Twitter, and we saw what a
big role news played on Facebook until Facebook decided that
it wouldn't. So certainly that it feels like there are
lots of green shoots in this area. The second part
of Paul's question was Nextdoor is not yet profitable. How
(10:18):
does it get there?
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Right?
Speaker 2 (10:20):
And that is really in the end, just matching, you know, growing,
continue to grow our revenue, so you are.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Roughly two hundred million annual run rate of revenue exactly
about three hundred of costs. That's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
But if you think about it, we are a scaled
business at this point in time. Our ability to keep
growing our revenue without.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Having every next dollar of revenue goes right to the
bottom exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
So next Door is not a huge you know, for
kind of holding up. I often think of us like
standing with this g enormous kind of world on our
shoulders of eighty five million plus users, we're actually quite
a small company underneath that in terms of people. And
this is the beauty of technology. It's such an incredibly
scaled business. Right we have gross margins that are in
(11:01):
the mid eighty five type range. So when you start
with gross margins there, then it is really about how
do we drive to scale from here. Part of it
is we've been doing a lot of investing, for example,
and being a more global footprint. We only monetize really
today in the US, the UK, a few other Canada
and New Zealand, Netherlands, but small, but we have built
(11:22):
a base. Right about twenty percent of our active users
come outside the US, but only ten percent of our revenue.
So you can see already there's also a move to
be made as we go more global.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Well, I think that's such a it's a useful insight,
especially for those of us who are in tech where
it felt like you had to add people to add revenue. Forever,
I will I will look back on the days when
I just tell people my biggest problem is we just
can't hire fast enough. And my company had profitability last year,
and from that moment forward you could see that almost
(11:52):
every dollar revenue now goes to the bottom line. It's this,
it's a tipping point, and it sounds like that tipping
point is not that far out for all of you exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
In fact, our stated goal is to be casual positive
at the end of twenty five, so we kind of
already see that run money in front of us.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
The next question ties in to this nicely. It's related
to your background, is from Catherine Boston, who asked, I'm
an FP and a financial planning and accounting and would
like to understand how does your background in finance serve
you as a leader and make you different from CEOs
who started in engineering or sales.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, so I would kind of start up by saying, Catherine,
don't overly define yourself as like I am this type
of person, because I think a great career is often
built on I appreciate it many many different kind of
pieces that we've in. In fact, usually what I tell
people when they come to me and say I do this,
I'm like, don't tell me it. In job terms. Tell
(12:56):
me what are you great at? Are you a great communicator?
Are you wonderful at analyzing data? Are you super innovative?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Right?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Finance people can be super innovative. Their job just doesn't
have to be analyzing data. So that's number one. I
do find I fall back a lot on the fact
I started my career actually as an engineer. I was
an engineer coming out of school. But that said, what
I do think that finance people have really going for
them is number one, they are incredibly numerous. They're very
good with numbers. They can stare at data and very
(13:25):
quickly spot patterns. Secondly, I think great finance people and
I hope you are one of these, and if not,
I'm going to send you out into your organization and beyond.
To become a great one is going and kind of
living side by side with your customer and really get
garnering empathy. The best thing that happened to me at
Square was when Jack said I want you to run
(13:47):
a business. I want you to start a business. And
I started. I helped you, along with an amazing group
of people, our Square Capital business, which was our lending business.
And you know it makes sense he I ran a
lot of risk at Square. We wanted the person who
ran a lot of risk and finance to have eyes
on a lending product. But it really gave me so
much empathy of what it was like for a product
(14:09):
manager starting that first kind of trying to get product
market fit. What it meant for that designer who was
trying to make the UIUX work well, what it meant
for the engineer coding in the background, because it was
a startup within a startup, And I think it made
me a much better CFO ultimately for the whole organization
because something I could understand why maybe when I asked
(14:32):
them to be perfect at forecasting, they weren't, Because it
turns out things just don't work straight up into the
right way Excel does. Like what happened in the same way.
Frankly in my career, you know, I took that motion
through Goldman where I was a research analyst, and I
found myself on these calls asking these executives like what happened,
Like ninety days ago you told me you were going
(14:53):
to do X, why haven't you done it? And now
I run real companies, I'm like, oh, yeah, because the
first thing you had to do was go hire someone.
It turns out to take longer than ninety days. Just
to find someone.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Our CFOT, my last company. Gillian had been a research
analyst with Mary Meeker. I think is on your.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Board, that's right.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
And what Jillian was, She's great at a bunch of things.
One of things she was so great at is because
she had sat in that seat as a research analyst.
She would do the earnings call that she wanted to
do here rather than the one that she wants you
know that I wanted to give. She would let me
give you one that I wanted to give. And my CFO, now,
Jeffrey was a lot of his background a deal guy
in a war, and so you see when somebody has
that spike in their background, jeff sees around the corners
(15:30):
to the deals. Jillian was so magical on a number
of things, including I are and my background. I'm like
a rescue dog, So I don't I don't know of
any one thing to point to, but you can see
the way it spikes totally.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
And you have what I call Range. And usually when
people come to me asking for career advice, I always
point them to go read the book Range because I
love the idea. It's this idea that you know to me,
the archetype of someone with Range is Leonardo da Vinci.
And I think it's because I both read the biography,
(16:04):
not the other Walls and biography at the same time
that I was reading Range. And if you think about
someone over in da Vinci's case, right, who's an artist,
but in order to be a better artist, he literally
goes to the morgue and starts cutting up corpses, which
helps him understand blood flow, which helps him understand water flow,
which makes him an amazing architect for dams. And it's
(16:25):
that I think when you called yourself a rescue dog,
you can see patterns emerged that you can then apply
in other situations. And so going back to that question,
don't make yourself an FP and a person you're not.
You have seen examples of things happen in your career.
How could you not go apply them if you were
in a job with a totally different name on the door.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
I think great advice for Catherine, and I'll drop the
book Range in the show notes. I haven't read this one,
so I'll put it up next for me. I've got
the next one from Linda in Mobile, Alabama.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Communities across America have frayed as people have moved online
and institutions like churches have become less important in people's laves.
What role has technology played in all of this? And
what do you think is the future role of technology?
Speaker 1 (17:13):
So a lot's been written on this loneliness and teens
not engaging socially, and people sort of point to the
internet and social media is the culprit. Yeah, give us,
give us your take on that situation, and then what's
going to fix it?
Speaker 2 (17:26):
I mean, it's long before the Internet. In fact, probably
the best work on this is doctor Putnam's work out
of Harvard Bowling Along and so really it actually starts
in the fifties, pre the fifties America in particular, his
work is done in the US. Is this incredibly the
society that's very much brought together by community, right, People
belong to the local fire department like they volunteer. You're
(17:50):
on the front stoop in your neighborhood. Everybody knows everyone,
and then TV comes along and suddenly people move off
the stoop back into a living room. It's supposed to
be a communal kind of entertainment, but it's not because
each of us is having a little bit of our
own interaction with that show. Then you fast forward to
now the beginning of the PC.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
My kids can watch a movie without also watching their
multi way where they're also chatting with their friends.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Absolutely and no doubt it has rewired us. And in
a world there's that beautiful phrase that someone said, you know,
in a world has never been more connected, We've never
been more alone. And we even next door have sponsored
a lot of research around loneliness and what can be
the antidote to loneliness. So a lot of people admire
the problem and it's an awful problem, but I'm looking
for the solution. And so one of the things we found,
(18:38):
working with a researcher out of BYU Julianne hol Lundstead,
is that knowing six neighbors or more. But that's the
moment where from a STATSIG perspective, you start to feelings
of social isolation diminish. So my dream is you go
for your annual check up with your doctor and he
asks you, are you exercising, are you smoking? Hopefully you're
(19:01):
not smoking, I hope you're moderating your alcohol consumption, and
do you know six neighbors? Because we often don't ask
the right question right for older people, doctors off from
the last things like what do you have for dinner,
and they should be asking who do you have dinner with?
That is a way better question to know about someone's
likelihood to either fall victim to other diseases, but to
live longer. Is do you have real social interaction or
(19:25):
are you lonely? So next door's case. My goal is
that we help people meet six neighbors. And it can
be in small ways like just remembering to pick your
head out of your phone and say hello to people
you know as you pass their house, maybe throw their
paper up onto the stoop whatever it is. Or it
might be in a moment like their own crisis. They
have lost their pet, they need someone to dig them
(19:47):
out in a snowstorm, like small acts of kindness. Yeah,
they're very good for your neighbor, but you know what
the secret is, they're great for you. They actually cause
a physiological response that creates a psychologe response. So that's
just some of the research we've done. But you can
tell we feel really strongly about this, and I think
it's a big part of why we exist as a company.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Right And you're bringing those neighborhoods together and all that
great stuff exactly. You know, a place where they seem
to get it right is I visited my parents in
a retirement community a few years ago, and I went
for a run and one of my parents' neighbors I
blocked and blocks away, waved flagged me down, and so
I thought there was trouble, Like everything okay, And the
older gentleman said to me, you know I used to run,
(20:31):
and I thought, oh, he stopped me to talk. Did
you imagine that happened to you? But there people moved
to a community like that with the intent of knowing
their neighbors and socializing and doing the lawn bowling together
and all that fun stuff. And there's not enough of
that in the country. It's nice that you're creating it.
You're creating that through your through your wrap. The next
(20:54):
question is from aj in London. What role is Jenna
I playing in your product now and what do you
foresee in the future.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
I love that. So we are a platform about data.
I think, I said, you know, I came to next
Door back in the day because I believe in the purpose,
but also unique data being the local knowledge graph is
a very unique place to be playing very dynamic constantly
being refreshed based on neighbor conversations every single minute our
day in the app. But what we've done specifically from
(21:25):
a jen Ai perspective, so the minute we saw chat
gipt last November, we're like, this is big, so let's
look in outside our app. So very quickly, you're actually
one of the first apps to launch a Jenny I assistant.
So today, if you're on next door and you're creating
a post, let's say, you know, I'm like, help, It's
my daughter's birthday this weekend. She loves ice cream cake.
(21:45):
I totally forgot to order. When where could I go?
We would rewrite that post for you. You hit the
little blue button, it rewrites it, and it'll rewrite it
based on training, on our data of what post will
be more engaging.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
More brevity, or more elogies.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
All of the But seventy percent of people click yeah,
I'd love that. Let me take that suggestion, which is
actually a huge number in tech. I was shocked thought
our data might be wrong. The fact that seventy percent
of people were like, yeah, let's take that.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Well, we were trained though, with a spell check button, right,
you do expect that the technology is supposed to help
you along the way, and so this is an advancement
of that.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
And actually what we see inside the data is businesses.
So local businesses are two times more likely than a
neighbor to accept the rewrite as well, which also tells
me that there's a lot of commercial element in here too.
In fact, early after chat gpt launched, I was in
Denver for ladies who launched You mentioned our nonprofit and
(22:40):
I was with a group of women and I was like, hey,
have you looked at this? Because they're all using platforms
like nextdoor but also the other social media platforms to
get the word out about their businesses. And for many
of them, they're not marketers, right, you know, sole proprietors
or people starting their own company. They are the CEO,
the CFO, the GC, the marketer, everything, and they don't
(23:01):
have time to be perfect cmos. And so when I
showed them, hey, you can ask this thing to write
your next post for social in the style of a
LinkedIn post, of an Instagram post, of a nextdoor post,
they was like saucer eyed, oh my god, this is amazing.
So I think that there is a real opportunity with businesses.
(23:22):
And then Finally, the last place we've used it is well,
hopefully won't be the last. But the other place we
launched at the same time was in moderation. So you
talked about the work we're willing to do in order
to create a welcoming platform, to slow people down, to
make onboarding a little harder, to make sure you're a
real person. So in this case, we have something called
kindness reminder. If you're writing a post that our mL
(23:43):
our machine learning says, hey, this post is going to
get moderated, it will pop up something in real time
that says, hey, neighbor. Great communities are creative with kindness.
What we're doing there is bringing you back to your
frontal lobe to get.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Over your browser plug in for the whole intern.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
I agree, maybe for the world, just even in real lute.
And that's a place where we also put forth a
more constructive way to say something. And I really think
this is important because I don't want to shut down
tough conversations like a lot of people's response to oh,
things are getting heated, let's not talk about this. I
(24:20):
don't buy that either. Go up in Northern Ireland in
the troubles. If we all hadn't learned to talk about
really tough things around the table, we should have never
gotten to peace. But I think it's about helping people
say things in a more constructive way. You're usually not
in the business of trying to change people's minds. Most
people will not ultimately change their mind but maybe you
can just inject that little bit of like empathy, of
(24:41):
like huh, I hadn't thought about it that way, which
might slightly move people, maybe more to a common ground.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
We have a similar feature on I'm on the board
of change dot org where if you want to create change,
first you have to create a petition and you put
it out there into the world and people come and
support the petition and ultimately decision makers are connected to
it and may decide to do something about it. But
that first step is really hard. You're like, I know
we're using too much public space for free parking, and
(25:10):
I want to start a petition, but you don't know
all the research. You don't have all of the data.
And we did a Jenai plug in where you push
the button now with your ideas and it turns it
into not only well written, but it also will when
you need it pull the research to help you get
over the finish line perfect. It's really it's really magical,
sort of that intersection of the intent of an engaged
(25:32):
member of the community with the capabilities of these models
that we're just starting to we're just starting to figure out.
Adrian and redmand says, women face all kinds of obstacles professionally,
but are increasingly at the center of the tech world.
Can you talk about how that is playing out in
your organizations.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
It's just so vital If we don't first of all,
it's a business imperative. If we don't look like our customers,
we cannot even pretend we're serving them because just by nature,
we all bring our own biases to the party. And
so if you get a diverse group of people around
the table, I think ultimately you can create something that
works better for everyone that wants to be your customer.
And the stats show this too, in terms of the
(26:11):
performance of companies that have more diverse leadership teams.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Well that there's actually research that shows as you add
women to teams and remove men, the teams get better
without diminishing returns, up to including having zero men. So
I sometimes joke like I'll turn the lights off on
my way out and wish everyone the best. But there
is real research to suggest that because women are more
likely to bring empathy and better listening and etc. To
team environments, that you're crazy not to have a team
(26:37):
that has a large composition of women. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
I do think that where the world has gone from
a technology perspective, you know, Silicon Valley in some ways
bowed to the I would call it the IQ gene. Right,
computer science was everything not to dig it. I was
an engineer myself, Jenny, and I is going to change that.
Suddenly coding is being democratized. Suddenly anyone can create some
lines of code, and that's a very interesting thing for
(27:00):
where we head in terms of our schools and universities
and so on. But when you put EQ and IQ together,
that's when problems get really hard. And if you want
to work on the hardest problems, I would kind of
tell yourself go work at the intersection. And I think
this is a place where women can excel because of
many of the more I don't want to be gender stereotypical,
(27:22):
but a lot more kind of focus on communication and collaboration,
on trying to get into the shoes of customers, but
then combining that with hardcore data, really strong science abilities,
like that's nirvana and that might not just be a
female thing. I mean, those are just great people that
we should be bringing through organizations, giving them a voice,
(27:44):
and making sure that we're nurturing them into senior roles.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Totally. I think the majority of my directs for the
last twelve or fifteen years have been women, and the
teams are just much much better, much much better for it.
And I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know,
but I certainly support that. In Hudson Valley wants to know.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
What's the weirdest thing you've seen posted on next door?
Speaker 2 (28:07):
The weirdest thing. I'm going to take it the weirdest thing.
This happened to me on nextdoor, which it's close so
during COVID, I, you know, we're all at home and
beyond just you know, running this platform and wanting to
see it grow. I wanted to be a part of
my community. I literally was like, I need to do something.
And this wonderful woman kind of popped up. She had
(28:28):
created a help group in my community, and she was
kind of paring people off, and I was like, I
could do something at the weekend. She was like, Okay,
I need you to go to the CBS or whatever
and get this person their firm, their weekly pharmacy or
whatever it was. So it was great. I did that
and then she was like, oh, you're a doer, will
you do something else? And she was slowly trying to
give me work, and eventually I was like, oh, I
(28:48):
have like a full time job too, but you know,
I'll keep doing this. And then she kept pinging me
on things, and then eventually she called me and she
started to speak and she had a Northern Irish accent,
and northern Northern Ireland is the size of a pe,
so it's very rare that you bump into people from
Northern Ireland. It's not lot of Irish people in the US,
a lot of people who have Irish heritage, but finding
someone from Northern Ireland in your backyard and we just
(29:11):
became fast friends and it's was so it was like
the universe spoke to me. So I don't know if
that's weird or funny. There's plenty of funny things.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Thank you very well, because there's some weird stuff. My
favorite is always when some local kid plays pranks in
the neighborhood and people keep posting is saying stop doing this,
like don't your only feet the kid who's carving the
inappropriate stuff and everyone's pumpkins or leaving a sandwich in
your mailbox. I just I think they are like wonderful
examples of the off pieced stuff that happens in a community.
(29:41):
And it's always somebody's fifteen year old, like out there
having a good time.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
And it's generational. Honestly, we're kind of built to you know,
the fifteen year old's going to be the person in
like sixty years that's like annoyed with the fifteen year old.
I kind of feel like it's part of how the
universe has to work to keep posts all in balance.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yes, that's exactly right. The last one is from Malik
in Kansas City. He wants to know with what you
know now, what advice would you give yourselves at twenty
five or thirty.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah, So it's like one thing that I always come
back to. Yeah, I would buy a lot of bigcoine
or eth actually is my thing, but either way you
do well with both. I always come back to this
thing about perfection that I feel like as a young woman,
you know, growing up when I did, and I think
(30:38):
it's still true today. I think girls foiced a lot
of perfectionism on themselves to be the a student, to
do everything perfectly, to get full marks and all their
tests and end. And while on the one hand it's great,
and then you tend to get praise for it and
lauded for it, and that only compounds this feeling of
like I have to be the best at everything, but
(30:58):
it is it can become a real limitter on your
enjoyment in life, but also just your ability to take risks.
And I think it's a It's something I really watch
for a lot. I have a I have a teenage girl.
She's got the perfection gene, and I'm constantly trying to
push her away from it, to say it's okay if
you don't get an A in this test. Like I
(31:18):
might be the only parent on the planet that's like,
I'm okay if you don't do this, because I want
you to go out and have fun one night or
two nights or whatever. But that perfection thing is it's
hard to shake. And I think in my twenty eight
you know, on the other side, I wonder would I
be doing all I did if I didn't have to
be excellent better often than everyone else around the table.
(31:40):
But I do think that perfection gene is a tough one,
and I think in my twenties in particular, it was
it was very, very strong. Today I'm a much more
kind of confident and who I am and you kind
of get what you take.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
I think it's great advice on you know, mind.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
What you get, Sorry, you get what you get.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Mine would have Mine rhymes a lot with yours, which
is I think, think earlier in your career, for me,
earlier in my career, being ambitious and wanting to have
an impact. There's a good amount of fake it till
you make it. But what it causes you to do
if you're not careful is act like you know, rather
(32:17):
than ask good smart questions. And if I could give
myself one piece of advice at twenty five or thirty,
it would be ask more and ask better questions. And
at one point it was my nearest resolution, I will
ask better questions, And I kept track of am I
asking better questions today? And I think I know for
a fact, I mean it made me a better learner
and a better teammate and I ultimately a better leader.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, and the two inter connected, if I can say that,
because sometimes when you feel need to be perfect, you
feel like anytime someone asks you a question, you have
to have the perfect answer. And I'm about to after
we finish here, go have a drink with someone who
was the audit chair of Square and he used to
always tell me right ahead of every earnings call, it
is perfectly to acceptable to say I don't know, but
(33:00):
I'll find that out for you and come back to
you with it a much better answer than either fake
it to you make it or feeling like you had
to come back exactly then with an answer. Sometimes it's
okay to wait to not know and then so sometimes
that inspires a more robust conversation. Yeah, instead of coming
off as I have all the answers.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
And I certainly applied this with investors where they would
say why aren't you doing this? Or what do you
think about that? It's always a moment for you to say.
To someone who has great pattern recognition, because they're invested
in a lot of companies, they spend a lot of
time they say, what would you do if you were me?
What do you see what do you think we're missing?
And then you have to answer the question too, because
that's why they have the earnings calls. Sarah, this was
super fun.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
We are all all of us, all eighty five million
of us who are on the app, are super appreciative
of the work you do and the company and the
kindness that comes through talking to you. It comes through
in your products too, and it's to yours and the
team's credits.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Thank you, tod like team effort. Thank you.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
You know.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Friends. On this podcasts, we tend to talk a lot
about how technology is reshaping industries, and I especially enjoyed
today's conversation because it's not only about how technology is
affecting businesses, but it's about how technology has over the
past decades, affected our personal lives, our communities, and our neighborhoods,
(34:19):
and in the case of Sarah's work and the work
of the good folks at Nextdoor, how technology is changing
the way for the better that we engage in our
local communities. When you think expansively about what local means,
whether it's local news and journalism, supporting local businesses scenario,
I personally have a lot of passion and I know
(34:40):
a lot of our listeners do. I'm really excited to
see in this next phase of technology, the next arc
of the growth of our industries, how tech comes back
to local markets and brings people together and helps more
these businesses and institutions and neighborhoods thrive. Today was a
really fun interview. I hope you all enjoyed it as
(35:02):
much as I did. We've got a week off and
then some amazing guests coming up. Don't forget. You can
text or call in your questions at two point three
four one nine, five, nine six, or just hit me
up on LinkedIn, Instagram, et cetera. At Mike Steibe. I
want to thank Sarah and of course Jen, Jada, Matt
and the whole team of Blue Duck Media for pulling
this all together, Dylan, Sasha Gay and the iHeart crew,
(35:25):
our friend Baheed here in the studio, and Ben and
the team of William Morris Endeavor for all their support.
Office hours is a production of Blue Duck Media and
we are distributed by iHeartRadio. Have a great week, everybody,
stay on your ground.
Welcome Office hours, when we sit down with the chief
executives shaping the world and we answer your most pressing
questions about leadership, careers, and life. I'm Mike Steibe, and
today we welcome to the show someone who has been
working tirelessly to improve your neighborhood. Sarah Friar is the
CEO of Nextdoor, the hyper local social networking app, which
(00:26):
went public in twenty twenty one. Previously, she was CFO
of Square and took that company public as well in
twenty fifteen. She started her career with stintse at McKinsey
and Company, Goldman Sachs and Salesforce. She serves on a
number of boards, including Walmart, and co founded Ladies who Launch,
a community and resource for female entrepreneurs. Sarah, I'm so
(00:49):
glad we caught you while you were in New York.
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Thank you. It's my pleasure. You even heated up New
York a little bit. It's not quite as.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Cold, it's not quite as called, but it's not great.
I mean, my family wants to go skiing for presidency
and I was like, are you sure?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Are you sure?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
It's too much? We got a bunch of questions from
the audience, some on your career someone next door and
the social graph and your background and finance and all
of it. So it's all right, we'll just we'll let
it rip.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Let's dive right in, all right.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
The first one came by voicemail from Enrique in Mountain View.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
He said, when next Door launched, the conventional wisdom was
that there was not room for another social network. Today
is my most used social app, and I think that's
true for a lot of people. How did next Door
break through despite powerful competitors like Facebook?
Speaker 2 (01:41):
So Enrique, thank you for that question, Thanks for being
a great neighbor. And if there was one word, I
would say, it's focus. So when you start anything, you
got to start right at the point where you know
you're going to get highest and best product market fit
to use a good kind of tech term. And next
Door started out as being the social network for your neighborhood,
(02:05):
but is owe so much more. But we've always been
all about local. We own the local knowledge graph, and
I think that focus is what's helped us now get
to over eighty five million people using the platform across
eleven countries. What I have always loved about Nextdoor is
to me, it's a global phenomenon. Everyone's a neighbor wherever
you show up in the world. Whether you agree with
(02:27):
how they run their countries, what they do in their countries,
local will still matter. So focus has been everything. Now
that said, the danger of next door is what someone
wants to describe to me as oh, you're going to
die from overeating, and I was like, what are you?
Speaker 1 (02:42):
It does everything I've got maps, I've got offers, I've
got nonprofits in my community. Is there's a lot of
lost dogs the whole time. A lot of things can
be How do you tie us from focus to what is? It?
Certainly a multi purpose app for my neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
So as we have grown, are ability obviously to do
more things compounds because we become a bigger organization. But
even today we really think about three We call them
jobs that our neighbors are trying to get done. Number
one is discuss and discover, so everything that's going on
around me locally. Help me find the best plumber, help
me find the best park for my toddler. The second
(03:20):
is more of a commercial journey, what we'd call for
sale and free. So we have a huge market place
today where a billion dollars a month is posted on nextdoor,
and about a quarter of it is actually posted for
free where people are upcycling recycling. But that journey of
why do people come to next door for that number
one is trust because it's real neighbors, and number two
is local and then the third area for us is
(03:43):
connect And that's all about the community part of nextdoor.
How do we help you find the local group that
you need, like in my.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Case, the bowling dads, You get together in the neighborhood, all.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
That and you'll find it's like this very very specific too, right,
there's all when you ask people for like local groups,
they'll say the mop, the bowling group, the running group.
But I find the spacicificity is what makes next door
so beautiful. Like in my neighborhood you'll find salsa dancers
of Marin. I live in the North Bay. There's woodworkers
(04:13):
of Mill Valley. So I love the spacicifity of local
because it could only show up in that community.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
And which of those is is your group?
Speaker 2 (04:23):
I'm all of the above. I can would work while
I saw the dance.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
I have to.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
There was also I remember when I joined, there was
a lot of friction to join, right, whereas most social networks.
When I joined, I picked a handle. It didn't have
to be me. I didn't have to verify it, I
had to prove my address. I was only allowed to
live in one area. And that must have slowed growth
for you. But at the same time, it certainly did
a lot to build trust that the people in my
(04:46):
neighborhood were legit.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Yeah, and that's very much on purpose. You're exactly right.
So a core tenant of nextdoor is it's real people
at real addresses. That has the positiveness of first of all,
building trust in the neighborhood. So you know when you
get on there that we have taken the time to
make sure these really are your neighbors that you're talking to.
It's not a bot, it's not an algorithm. It's a
real person.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
And neighbors invite other neighbors to you.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
And they also kind of keep an eye on the
neighborhood too, they make sure these truly are my neighbors
that are on there. It also helps our business model
because in the advertisers want to make sure that they're
putting advertising to real people. So being able to also
make that part of how we monetize. The two have
to go together. You've got to. We're a for profit,
we need to have a P and L that matches
our aspiration of cultivating a kinder world where everyone has
(05:32):
a neighborhood to rely on. But the two things have
to go together. And that's where being built on trust
from the get go really works well, both to bring
new neighbors to the platform, bringing other stakeholders in like
public agencies or small businesses, but it also is really
important to our business model.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
I'm going to jump ahead to a question that was
texted to us from Paul and Detroit, and this is
an area of real interest for me too. He says.
I'm a local journalist and for the last twenty years
have watched our newsrooms get small and smaller as the
local business model has struggled. Do you see a sustainable
business model for local and are there lessons to apply
(06:08):
the first part of this question. I wanted to give you.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
A chance to Yeah, I do see a business model.
I see multiple business models, right. The one that we
have chosen to start with is the ad model, and
we've seen other social platforms do incredibly well for that.
The reason I'm in New York is I'm spending a
bunch of time with customers potential customers here because a
lot of advertisers are actually they may feel like big
national companies like take the Walmarts of the world, at
(06:33):
the same time, they act incredibly locally and often they
are the place where the store manager might be the
person that sponsors the local school football team. Right, so
you get these wonderful kind of like loops that go
on locally. So advertising can be a very powerful model
for us from an enterprise perspective. But there's also no
(06:55):
place today like the Yellow Pages has kind of died.
People used to stick things up the local supermarket, right
if you had a side hospital, if you were a
dogwalker or whatever. How do you get your business known today?
If you're starting from scratch, next door is a beautiful
place for that as well. So we can go literally
from the dog walker, the babysitter, the house cleaner, all
(07:16):
the way up to some of the largest companies in
the world. Because what are they trying to do. They
want to find new customers at a local level. They
want to upsell and cross sell to those customers, but
often they want to reinvest back in the community and
show up authentically. So that is a beautiful business model,
and it's one that has driven us from private company
into the public markets.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
As you think about where Paul's coming from, where he's thinking,
he's thinking about local news and local journalism, and there's
all this research that shows our democracy suffers and local
news suffers. You have more polarization, less local engagement, et cetera.
Is there something that you're learning in the business model
that can be applied more broadly. Is there something that
traditional local media maybe has been missing as their business
(08:00):
model seems to be really struggling to keep up with
the cost of creating the content.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Absolutely. You know, we actually work today with a lot
of newsrooms across the country. I think we have about
six hundred local news organizations that can api use a
tech term into nextdoor to put their content on the platform.
What I've seen in terms of engagement is if we
put their content on the platform, right, I want a
partnership with Nextdoor and I want to put this content
(08:26):
into your doesn't get great engagement relative to user generated content.
We have tried a second route, which is let's get
the journalist who's also a neighbor to make the post.
So now we've got like a human posting again. Not
great better engagement, not great engagement. The best engagement is
when that news article is written and a neighbor posts it,
(08:47):
and again it's because it's coming. Now with editorial, it's like, hey,
you know, did you just see this got posted in
your local paper about the town console meeting last night?
I disagree with this. So this tells me that there
is a place for great journalism because to your point,
it is a cornerstone of democracy. But it has to
be done together with a community. Now, how do we
(09:08):
close that loop and help those journalists get paid for
what they do. I don't think we've gotten the whole
way there yet because today we're still dependent somewhat on
whoever they write for to have come up with the
business model to pay the journalist. But I think there's
something really interesting here. In some ways, influencers on social
media are maybe already a step ahead. But how do
(09:29):
we get journalists to almost act as individual influencers to
make sure they keep the integrity of the institution in
a way, But then how do we get them distribution
that ultimately ends in a business model. I think there
is a loop to be closed there. We've not gotten
the whole way there yet, but I do think it
is absolutely vital. It's why I tend to lean into
(09:51):
different organizations like the Nineteenth is a great example, which
sponsors women and particularly women of color.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
In the newsroom, we've seen seeds of this. National journalists
especially really leaned into Twitter, and we saw what a
big role news played on Facebook until Facebook decided that
it wouldn't. So certainly that it feels like there are
lots of green shoots in this area. The second part
of Paul's question was Nextdoor is not yet profitable. How
(10:18):
does it get there?
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Right?
Speaker 2 (10:20):
And that is really in the end, just matching, you know, growing,
continue to grow our revenue, so you are.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Roughly two hundred million annual run rate of revenue exactly
about three hundred of costs. That's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
But if you think about it, we are a scaled
business at this point in time. Our ability to keep
growing our revenue without.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Having every next dollar of revenue goes right to the
bottom exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
So next Door is not a huge you know, for
kind of holding up. I often think of us like
standing with this g enormous kind of world on our
shoulders of eighty five million plus users, we're actually quite
a small company underneath that in terms of people. And
this is the beauty of technology. It's such an incredibly
scaled business. Right we have gross margins that are in
(11:01):
the mid eighty five type range. So when you start
with gross margins there, then it is really about how
do we drive to scale from here. Part of it
is we've been doing a lot of investing, for example,
and being a more global footprint. We only monetize really
today in the US, the UK, a few other Canada
and New Zealand, Netherlands, but small, but we have built
(11:22):
a base. Right about twenty percent of our active users
come outside the US, but only ten percent of our revenue.
So you can see already there's also a move to
be made as we go more global.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Well, I think that's such a it's a useful insight,
especially for those of us who are in tech where
it felt like you had to add people to add revenue. Forever,
I will I will look back on the days when
I just tell people my biggest problem is we just
can't hire fast enough. And my company had profitability last year,
and from that moment forward you could see that almost
(11:52):
every dollar revenue now goes to the bottom line. It's this,
it's a tipping point, and it sounds like that tipping
point is not that far out for all of you exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
In fact, our stated goal is to be casual positive
at the end of twenty five, so we kind of
already see that run money in front of us.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
The next question ties in to this nicely. It's related
to your background, is from Catherine Boston, who asked, I'm
an FP and a financial planning and accounting and would
like to understand how does your background in finance serve
you as a leader and make you different from CEOs
who started in engineering or sales.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, so I would kind of start up by saying, Catherine,
don't overly define yourself as like I am this type
of person, because I think a great career is often
built on I appreciate it many many different kind of
pieces that we've in. In fact, usually what I tell
people when they come to me and say I do this,
I'm like, don't tell me it. In job terms. Tell
(12:56):
me what are you great at? Are you a great communicator?
Are you wonderful at analyzing data? Are you super innovative?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Right?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Finance people can be super innovative. Their job just doesn't
have to be analyzing data. So that's number one. I
do find I fall back a lot on the fact
I started my career actually as an engineer. I was
an engineer coming out of school. But that said, what
I do think that finance people have really going for
them is number one, they are incredibly numerous. They're very
good with numbers. They can stare at data and very
(13:25):
quickly spot patterns. Secondly, I think great finance people and
I hope you are one of these, and if not,
I'm going to send you out into your organization and beyond.
To become a great one is going and kind of
living side by side with your customer and really get
garnering empathy. The best thing that happened to me at
Square was when Jack said I want you to run
(13:47):
a business. I want you to start a business. And
I started. I helped you, along with an amazing group
of people, our Square Capital business, which was our lending business.
And you know it makes sense he I ran a
lot of risk at Square. We wanted the person who
ran a lot of risk and finance to have eyes
on a lending product. But it really gave me so
much empathy of what it was like for a product
(14:09):
manager starting that first kind of trying to get product
market fit. What it meant for that designer who was
trying to make the UIUX work well, what it meant
for the engineer coding in the background, because it was
a startup within a startup, And I think it made
me a much better CFO ultimately for the whole organization
because something I could understand why maybe when I asked
(14:32):
them to be perfect at forecasting, they weren't, Because it
turns out things just don't work straight up into the
right way Excel does. Like what happened in the same way.
Frankly in my career, you know, I took that motion
through Goldman where I was a research analyst, and I
found myself on these calls asking these executives like what happened,
Like ninety days ago you told me you were going
(14:53):
to do X, why haven't you done it? And now
I run real companies, I'm like, oh, yeah, because the
first thing you had to do was go hire someone.
It turns out to take longer than ninety days. Just
to find someone.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Our CFOT, my last company. Gillian had been a research
analyst with Mary Meeker. I think is on your.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Board, that's right.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
And what Jillian was, She's great at a bunch of things.
One of things she was so great at is because
she had sat in that seat as a research analyst.
She would do the earnings call that she wanted to
do here rather than the one that she wants you
know that I wanted to give. She would let me
give you one that I wanted to give. And my CFO, now,
Jeffrey was a lot of his background a deal guy
in a war, and so you see when somebody has
that spike in their background, jeff sees around the corners
(15:30):
to the deals. Jillian was so magical on a number
of things, including I are and my background. I'm like
a rescue dog, So I don't I don't know of
any one thing to point to, but you can see
the way it spikes totally.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
And you have what I call Range. And usually when
people come to me asking for career advice, I always
point them to go read the book Range because I
love the idea. It's this idea that you know to me,
the archetype of someone with Range is Leonardo da Vinci.
And I think it's because I both read the biography,
(16:04):
not the other Walls and biography at the same time
that I was reading Range. And if you think about
someone over in da Vinci's case, right, who's an artist,
but in order to be a better artist, he literally
goes to the morgue and starts cutting up corpses, which
helps him understand blood flow, which helps him understand water flow,
which makes him an amazing architect for dams. And it's
(16:25):
that I think when you called yourself a rescue dog,
you can see patterns emerged that you can then apply
in other situations. And so going back to that question,
don't make yourself an FP and a person you're not.
You have seen examples of things happen in your career.
How could you not go apply them if you were
in a job with a totally different name on the door.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
I think great advice for Catherine, and I'll drop the
book Range in the show notes. I haven't read this one,
so I'll put it up next for me. I've got
the next one from Linda in Mobile, Alabama.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Communities across America have frayed as people have moved online
and institutions like churches have become less important in people's laves.
What role has technology played in all of this? And
what do you think is the future role of technology?
Speaker 1 (17:13):
So a lot's been written on this loneliness and teens
not engaging socially, and people sort of point to the
internet and social media is the culprit. Yeah, give us,
give us your take on that situation, and then what's
going to fix it?
Speaker 2 (17:26):
I mean, it's long before the Internet. In fact, probably
the best work on this is doctor Putnam's work out
of Harvard Bowling Along and so really it actually starts
in the fifties, pre the fifties America in particular, his
work is done in the US. Is this incredibly the
society that's very much brought together by community, right, People
belong to the local fire department like they volunteer. You're
(17:50):
on the front stoop in your neighborhood. Everybody knows everyone,
and then TV comes along and suddenly people move off
the stoop back into a living room. It's supposed to
be a communal kind of entertainment, but it's not because
each of us is having a little bit of our
own interaction with that show. Then you fast forward to
now the beginning of the PC.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
My kids can watch a movie without also watching their
multi way where they're also chatting with their friends.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Absolutely and no doubt it has rewired us. And in
a world there's that beautiful phrase that someone said, you know,
in a world has never been more connected, We've never
been more alone. And we even next door have sponsored
a lot of research around loneliness and what can be
the antidote to loneliness. So a lot of people admire
the problem and it's an awful problem, but I'm looking
for the solution. And so one of the things we found,
(18:38):
working with a researcher out of BYU Julianne hol Lundstead,
is that knowing six neighbors or more. But that's the
moment where from a STATSIG perspective, you start to feelings
of social isolation diminish. So my dream is you go
for your annual check up with your doctor and he
asks you, are you exercising, are you smoking? Hopefully you're
(19:01):
not smoking, I hope you're moderating your alcohol consumption, and
do you know six neighbors? Because we often don't ask
the right question right for older people, doctors off from
the last things like what do you have for dinner,
and they should be asking who do you have dinner with?
That is a way better question to know about someone's
likelihood to either fall victim to other diseases, but to
live longer. Is do you have real social interaction or
(19:25):
are you lonely? So next door's case. My goal is
that we help people meet six neighbors. And it can
be in small ways like just remembering to pick your
head out of your phone and say hello to people
you know as you pass their house, maybe throw their
paper up onto the stoop whatever it is. Or it
might be in a moment like their own crisis. They
have lost their pet, they need someone to dig them
(19:47):
out in a snowstorm, like small acts of kindness. Yeah,
they're very good for your neighbor, but you know what
the secret is, they're great for you. They actually cause
a physiological response that creates a psychologe response. So that's
just some of the research we've done. But you can
tell we feel really strongly about this, and I think
it's a big part of why we exist as a company.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Right And you're bringing those neighborhoods together and all that
great stuff exactly. You know, a place where they seem
to get it right is I visited my parents in
a retirement community a few years ago, and I went
for a run and one of my parents' neighbors I
blocked and blocks away, waved flagged me down, and so
I thought there was trouble, Like everything okay, And the
older gentleman said to me, you know I used to run,
(20:31):
and I thought, oh, he stopped me to talk. Did
you imagine that happened to you? But there people moved
to a community like that with the intent of knowing
their neighbors and socializing and doing the lawn bowling together
and all that fun stuff. And there's not enough of
that in the country. It's nice that you're creating it.
You're creating that through your through your wrap. The next
(20:54):
question is from aj in London. What role is Jenna
I playing in your product now and what do you
foresee in the future.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
I love that. So we are a platform about data.
I think, I said, you know, I came to next
Door back in the day because I believe in the purpose,
but also unique data being the local knowledge graph is
a very unique place to be playing very dynamic constantly
being refreshed based on neighbor conversations every single minute our
day in the app. But what we've done specifically from
(21:25):
a jen Ai perspective, so the minute we saw chat
gipt last November, we're like, this is big, so let's
look in outside our app. So very quickly, you're actually
one of the first apps to launch a Jenny I assistant.
So today, if you're on next door and you're creating
a post, let's say, you know, I'm like, help, It's
my daughter's birthday this weekend. She loves ice cream cake.
(21:45):
I totally forgot to order. When where could I go?
We would rewrite that post for you. You hit the
little blue button, it rewrites it, and it'll rewrite it
based on training, on our data of what post will
be more engaging.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
More brevity, or more elogies.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
All of the But seventy percent of people click yeah,
I'd love that. Let me take that suggestion, which is
actually a huge number in tech. I was shocked thought
our data might be wrong. The fact that seventy percent
of people were like, yeah, let's take that.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Well, we were trained though, with a spell check button, right,
you do expect that the technology is supposed to help
you along the way, and so this is an advancement
of that.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
And actually what we see inside the data is businesses.
So local businesses are two times more likely than a
neighbor to accept the rewrite as well, which also tells
me that there's a lot of commercial element in here too.
In fact, early after chat gpt launched, I was in
Denver for ladies who launched You mentioned our nonprofit and
(22:40):
I was with a group of women and I was like, hey,
have you looked at this? Because they're all using platforms
like nextdoor but also the other social media platforms to
get the word out about their businesses. And for many
of them, they're not marketers, right, you know, sole proprietors
or people starting their own company. They are the CEO,
the CFO, the GC, the marketer, everything, and they don't
(23:01):
have time to be perfect cmos. And so when I
showed them, hey, you can ask this thing to write
your next post for social in the style of a
LinkedIn post, of an Instagram post, of a nextdoor post,
they was like saucer eyed, oh my god, this is amazing.
So I think that there is a real opportunity with businesses.
(23:22):
And then Finally, the last place we've used it is well,
hopefully won't be the last. But the other place we
launched at the same time was in moderation. So you
talked about the work we're willing to do in order
to create a welcoming platform, to slow people down, to
make onboarding a little harder, to make sure you're a
real person. So in this case, we have something called
kindness reminder. If you're writing a post that our mL
(23:43):
our machine learning says, hey, this post is going to
get moderated, it will pop up something in real time
that says, hey, neighbor. Great communities are creative with kindness.
What we're doing there is bringing you back to your
frontal lobe to get.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Over your browser plug in for the whole intern.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
I agree, maybe for the world, just even in real lute.
And that's a place where we also put forth a
more constructive way to say something. And I really think
this is important because I don't want to shut down
tough conversations like a lot of people's response to oh,
things are getting heated, let's not talk about this. I
(24:20):
don't buy that either. Go up in Northern Ireland in
the troubles. If we all hadn't learned to talk about
really tough things around the table, we should have never
gotten to peace. But I think it's about helping people
say things in a more constructive way. You're usually not
in the business of trying to change people's minds. Most
people will not ultimately change their mind but maybe you
can just inject that little bit of like empathy, of
(24:41):
like huh, I hadn't thought about it that way, which
might slightly move people, maybe more to a common ground.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
We have a similar feature on I'm on the board
of change dot org where if you want to create change,
first you have to create a petition and you put
it out there into the world and people come and
support the petition and ultimately decision makers are connected to
it and may decide to do something about it. But
that first step is really hard. You're like, I know
we're using too much public space for free parking, and
(25:10):
I want to start a petition, but you don't know
all the research. You don't have all of the data.
And we did a Jenai plug in where you push
the button now with your ideas and it turns it
into not only well written, but it also will when
you need it pull the research to help you get
over the finish line perfect. It's really it's really magical,
sort of that intersection of the intent of an engaged
(25:32):
member of the community with the capabilities of these models
that we're just starting to we're just starting to figure out.
Adrian and redmand says, women face all kinds of obstacles professionally,
but are increasingly at the center of the tech world.
Can you talk about how that is playing out in
your organizations.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
It's just so vital If we don't first of all,
it's a business imperative. If we don't look like our customers,
we cannot even pretend we're serving them because just by nature,
we all bring our own biases to the party. And
so if you get a diverse group of people around
the table, I think ultimately you can create something that
works better for everyone that wants to be your customer.
And the stats show this too, in terms of the
(26:11):
performance of companies that have more diverse leadership teams.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Well that there's actually research that shows as you add
women to teams and remove men, the teams get better
without diminishing returns, up to including having zero men. So
I sometimes joke like I'll turn the lights off on
my way out and wish everyone the best. But there
is real research to suggest that because women are more
likely to bring empathy and better listening and etc. To
team environments, that you're crazy not to have a team
(26:37):
that has a large composition of women. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
I do think that where the world has gone from
a technology perspective, you know, Silicon Valley in some ways
bowed to the I would call it the IQ gene. Right,
computer science was everything not to dig it. I was
an engineer myself, Jenny, and I is going to change that.
Suddenly coding is being democratized. Suddenly anyone can create some
lines of code, and that's a very interesting thing for
(27:00):
where we head in terms of our schools and universities
and so on. But when you put EQ and IQ together,
that's when problems get really hard. And if you want
to work on the hardest problems, I would kind of
tell yourself go work at the intersection. And I think
this is a place where women can excel because of
many of the more I don't want to be gender stereotypical,
(27:22):
but a lot more kind of focus on communication and collaboration,
on trying to get into the shoes of customers, but
then combining that with hardcore data, really strong science abilities,
like that's nirvana and that might not just be a
female thing. I mean, those are just great people that
we should be bringing through organizations, giving them a voice,
(27:44):
and making sure that we're nurturing them into senior roles.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Totally. I think the majority of my directs for the
last twelve or fifteen years have been women, and the
teams are just much much better, much much better for it.
And I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know,
but I certainly support that. In Hudson Valley wants to know.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
What's the weirdest thing you've seen posted on next door?
Speaker 2 (28:07):
The weirdest thing. I'm going to take it the weirdest thing.
This happened to me on nextdoor, which it's close so
during COVID, I, you know, we're all at home and
beyond just you know, running this platform and wanting to
see it grow. I wanted to be a part of
my community. I literally was like, I need to do something.
And this wonderful woman kind of popped up. She had
(28:28):
created a help group in my community, and she was
kind of paring people off, and I was like, I
could do something at the weekend. She was like, Okay,
I need you to go to the CBS or whatever
and get this person their firm, their weekly pharmacy or
whatever it was. So it was great. I did that
and then she was like, oh, you're a doer, will
you do something else? And she was slowly trying to
give me work, and eventually I was like, oh, I
(28:48):
have like a full time job too, but you know,
I'll keep doing this. And then she kept pinging me
on things, and then eventually she called me and she
started to speak and she had a Northern Irish accent,
and northern Northern Ireland is the size of a pe,
so it's very rare that you bump into people from
Northern Ireland. It's not lot of Irish people in the US,
a lot of people who have Irish heritage, but finding
someone from Northern Ireland in your backyard and we just
(29:11):
became fast friends and it's was so it was like
the universe spoke to me. So I don't know if
that's weird or funny. There's plenty of funny things.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Thank you very well, because there's some weird stuff. My
favorite is always when some local kid plays pranks in
the neighborhood and people keep posting is saying stop doing this,
like don't your only feet the kid who's carving the
inappropriate stuff and everyone's pumpkins or leaving a sandwich in
your mailbox. I just I think they are like wonderful
examples of the off pieced stuff that happens in a community.
(29:41):
And it's always somebody's fifteen year old, like out there
having a good time.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
And it's generational. Honestly, we're kind of built to you know,
the fifteen year old's going to be the person in
like sixty years that's like annoyed with the fifteen year old.
I kind of feel like it's part of how the
universe has to work to keep posts all in balance.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yes, that's exactly right. The last one is from Malik
in Kansas City. He wants to know with what you
know now, what advice would you give yourselves at twenty
five or thirty.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah, So it's like one thing that I always come
back to. Yeah, I would buy a lot of bigcoine
or eth actually is my thing, but either way you
do well with both. I always come back to this
thing about perfection that I feel like as a young woman,
you know, growing up when I did, and I think
(30:38):
it's still true today. I think girls foiced a lot
of perfectionism on themselves to be the a student, to
do everything perfectly, to get full marks and all their
tests and end. And while on the one hand it's great,
and then you tend to get praise for it and
lauded for it, and that only compounds this feeling of
like I have to be the best at everything, but
(30:58):
it is it can become a real limitter on your
enjoyment in life, but also just your ability to take risks.
And I think it's a It's something I really watch
for a lot. I have a I have a teenage girl.
She's got the perfection gene, and I'm constantly trying to
push her away from it, to say it's okay if
you don't get an A in this test. Like I
(31:18):
might be the only parent on the planet that's like,
I'm okay if you don't do this, because I want
you to go out and have fun one night or
two nights or whatever. But that perfection thing is it's
hard to shake. And I think in my twenty eight
you know, on the other side, I wonder would I
be doing all I did if I didn't have to
be excellent better often than everyone else around the table.
(31:40):
But I do think that perfection gene is a tough one,
and I think in my twenties in particular, it was
it was very, very strong. Today I'm a much more
kind of confident and who I am and you kind
of get what you take.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
I think it's great advice on you know, mind.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
What you get, Sorry, you get what you get.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Mine would have Mine rhymes a lot with yours, which
is I think, think earlier in your career, for me,
earlier in my career, being ambitious and wanting to have
an impact. There's a good amount of fake it till
you make it. But what it causes you to do
if you're not careful is act like you know, rather
(32:17):
than ask good smart questions. And if I could give
myself one piece of advice at twenty five or thirty,
it would be ask more and ask better questions. And
at one point it was my nearest resolution, I will
ask better questions, And I kept track of am I
asking better questions today? And I think I know for
a fact, I mean it made me a better learner
and a better teammate and I ultimately a better leader.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, and the two inter connected, if I can say that,
because sometimes when you feel need to be perfect, you
feel like anytime someone asks you a question, you have
to have the perfect answer. And I'm about to after
we finish here, go have a drink with someone who
was the audit chair of Square and he used to
always tell me right ahead of every earnings call, it
is perfectly to acceptable to say I don't know, but
(33:00):
I'll find that out for you and come back to
you with it a much better answer than either fake
it to you make it or feeling like you had
to come back exactly then with an answer. Sometimes it's
okay to wait to not know and then so sometimes
that inspires a more robust conversation. Yeah, instead of coming
off as I have all the answers.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
And I certainly applied this with investors where they would
say why aren't you doing this? Or what do you
think about that? It's always a moment for you to say.
To someone who has great pattern recognition, because they're invested
in a lot of companies, they spend a lot of
time they say, what would you do if you were me?
What do you see what do you think we're missing?
And then you have to answer the question too, because
that's why they have the earnings calls. Sarah, this was
super fun.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
We are all all of us, all eighty five million
of us who are on the app, are super appreciative
of the work you do and the company and the
kindness that comes through talking to you. It comes through
in your products too, and it's to yours and the
team's credits.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Thank you, tod like team effort. Thank you.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
You know.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Friends. On this podcasts, we tend to talk a lot
about how technology is reshaping industries, and I especially enjoyed
today's conversation because it's not only about how technology is
affecting businesses, but it's about how technology has over the
past decades, affected our personal lives, our communities, and our neighborhoods,
(34:19):
and in the case of Sarah's work and the work
of the good folks at Nextdoor, how technology is changing
the way for the better that we engage in our
local communities. When you think expansively about what local means,
whether it's local news and journalism, supporting local businesses scenario,
I personally have a lot of passion and I know
(34:40):
a lot of our listeners do. I'm really excited to
see in this next phase of technology, the next arc
of the growth of our industries, how tech comes back
to local markets and brings people together and helps more
these businesses and institutions and neighborhoods thrive. Today was a
really fun interview. I hope you all enjoyed it as
(35:02):
much as I did. We've got a week off and
then some amazing guests coming up. Don't forget. You can
text or call in your questions at two point three
four one nine, five, nine six, or just hit me
up on LinkedIn, Instagram, et cetera. At Mike Steibe. I
want to thank Sarah and of course Jen, Jada, Matt
and the whole team of Blue Duck Media for pulling
this all together, Dylan, Sasha Gay and the iHeart crew,
(35:25):
our friend Baheed here in the studio, and Ben and
the team of William Morris Endeavor for all their support.
Office hours is a production of Blue Duck Media and
we are distributed by iHeartRadio. Have a great week, everybody,
stay on your ground.
Host
Mike Steib
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